Teemu Takala’s Lecture Today – Reflection

I wanted to write a little reflection about today’s Tulimyrsky afternoon seminar but it became a 7 page pdf you can download here. So there’s more pictures and ideas. Here are few more concrete ones:

His basic idea is this:

Which is also well illustrated in this video he showed to us:

He made me ask myself following questions:

1. How does Monkey Business enrich the lives of it’s customers and partners?

2. What is the marketing agenda/program of Monkey Business?

3. How could Monkey Business, or should Monkey Business do some kind of visible and audible takeover of a seminar or a lecture? (Even more aggressively than what we’ve been doing, kind of stuff like running through the stage dressed up only with banana peels or something like that)?

4. How can we bring customer close to an activity that brings her close to making a decision about buying our services or products? (What are our services and products?)

Maybe Hans was thinking about the same questions:

One idea that I got from Teemu was to start using Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bananadotfi) more actively. I created an account there thanks to Ralf but initially I told him that I am not quite sure how active I will get with it. We agreed to trust the process on this one as well. So the idea how to use the twitter is to report experiences from seminars/lectures to the internet on a regular basis through the Twitter or Jaiku, let’s see which one I end up using actively. Jaiku is a Finnish originally and thus could be better to support home made products.

Letim in the picture below is probably the best of our Team Academy coaches in the social media. I think it is because he used to be a social second generation shop keeper so he’s got some special unique tacit knowledge. Check one of his numerous blogs in here:

Never mind the questions I asked (see them in the pdf), I think what is more interesting is the question about making questions in seminars. In this Tulimyrsky we couldn’t get over the traditional guru-audience type of interaction where audience asks the questions and guru answers. We didn’t reach the engagement Teemu preached about. I felt un-comfort and anxiety when asking these questions as I couldn’t find there and then a way to shift the system into a co-creation, not even when it was my turn to ask the question. I in a way pulled the carpet from under his feet by answering the questions more in depth than what he did after he had answered. And in fact, somebody had already asked the question about engagement with the audience. The challenge in such a guru presentations is the real co-creation with the audience. I think in a way World Cafe tool if used skillfully can be a tool for this. Maybe?

I went to talk with him about this afterwards and fortunately our Henna and Johanna were already there chatting with him. We had an interesting conversation about couple of things. Didn’t really cover my dilemma of co-creation with the audience, but we talked about how Monkey Business is very energetic and creative in marketing itself, even not knowing what it is. For this Teemu replied something like this: ”Keep that energy and enthusiasm.” He also talked how easy it is to loose the enthusiasm and become cynical. He said the reason would be that because in the creative fields you get hits on your face too often after coming up with a great idea in your own opinion. For this Henna replied that we are happy to come over to your office some day to bring some more energy there but Teemu told us that he’s got some real propellerheadz in his office that got more energy than we do. Of course we take this as a challenge and have to see that one day. Teem said that his job as a leader is to encourage that energy, enthusiasm and creativity of his team. I agree.

Later on we thought that remedy for this cynicism Teemu mentioned could be the power of community and your team. Actually, one of the best things for me today was to be again somewhere among loads of people as a strong yellow team of Monkeys. The question still remains open though – What is this Monkey Business?